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"By J.A. Adande
The reason teams should be allowed to hold out players whenever they want are as simple as A, B, C.
Antawn Jamison.
Brandon Roy.
Carlos Boozer.
They participated in late-season games and suffered an ankle, meniscus and oblique muscle injury, respectively, and to varying degrees of damage. That’s $28 million worth of players, vital parts of their teams’ postseason plans, jeopardized in three quick plays. Boozer and Roy were trying to get their teams into higher playoff seeds. But if a team has nothing at stake why take the risk?
Obligation to the paying customers? An owner shelling out $15 million for a player takes precedence over a fan spending $150 on a ticket. And satisfying protecting the team’s own fan base means more than satisfying a crowd that only gets one or two visits from an out-of-town star.
Being like Mike? Yes, Michael Jordan played 82 games nine times, right up until his final season at age 39. But when we make comparisons to the G.O.A.T. is that really the criteria we use? If Kobe or LeBron get to seven championships would you really downgrade them because they didn’t suit up for game 81 in Milwaukee one year?
David Stern said the league would look into the sitting issue of teams resting players instead of playing them. But that process will end up in the same bin as the notion to penalize flopping that died quickly a couple of years ago. In both cases it’s too difficult to separate the real from the fake with 100% accuracy. The NBA already reached that conclusion when it abandoned the injured list procedure and allowed teams to activate or deactivate players whenever they wanted and for whatever reason. (In a related story, the number of reported cases of tendinitis dropped drastically).
There’s a compromise to protect both the players and the fans. Don't release the bulk of tickets for the games in the final week of the season until they are near. Force teams to give a 24-hour notice on which players will participate in the game. Then conduct an internet auction for the tickets. If the understudies are playing the tickets will fetch less value. If LeBron James and Dwyane Wade are battling it out for the top seed in the Eastern Conference the market will drive the prices up.
One of the greatest appeals of sports is that no outcome is guaranteed. In this case, at least, both the teams and the fans could get what they pay for."
http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/14989/putting-the-rest-issue-to-rest
We could have beat the Lakers
The reason teams should be allowed to hold out players whenever they want are as simple as A, B, C.
Antawn Jamison.
Brandon Roy.
Carlos Boozer.
They participated in late-season games and suffered an ankle, meniscus and oblique muscle injury, respectively, and to varying degrees of damage. That’s $28 million worth of players, vital parts of their teams’ postseason plans, jeopardized in three quick plays. Boozer and Roy were trying to get their teams into higher playoff seeds. But if a team has nothing at stake why take the risk?
Obligation to the paying customers? An owner shelling out $15 million for a player takes precedence over a fan spending $150 on a ticket. And satisfying protecting the team’s own fan base means more than satisfying a crowd that only gets one or two visits from an out-of-town star.
Being like Mike? Yes, Michael Jordan played 82 games nine times, right up until his final season at age 39. But when we make comparisons to the G.O.A.T. is that really the criteria we use? If Kobe or LeBron get to seven championships would you really downgrade them because they didn’t suit up for game 81 in Milwaukee one year?
David Stern said the league would look into the sitting issue of teams resting players instead of playing them. But that process will end up in the same bin as the notion to penalize flopping that died quickly a couple of years ago. In both cases it’s too difficult to separate the real from the fake with 100% accuracy. The NBA already reached that conclusion when it abandoned the injured list procedure and allowed teams to activate or deactivate players whenever they wanted and for whatever reason. (In a related story, the number of reported cases of tendinitis dropped drastically).
There’s a compromise to protect both the players and the fans. Don't release the bulk of tickets for the games in the final week of the season until they are near. Force teams to give a 24-hour notice on which players will participate in the game. Then conduct an internet auction for the tickets. If the understudies are playing the tickets will fetch less value. If LeBron James and Dwyane Wade are battling it out for the top seed in the Eastern Conference the market will drive the prices up.
One of the greatest appeals of sports is that no outcome is guaranteed. In this case, at least, both the teams and the fans could get what they pay for."
http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/14989/putting-the-rest-issue-to-rest
We could have beat the Lakers
